Bitcoin and Ethereum: The Crypto Experiment Rolls On

It’s never a dull day in crypto-land, and the great experiment progresses forward. The price of Bitcoin has declined a hair over the past 24 hours but remains relatively stable. Over the past few weeks, the value has maintained above $400 USD or more. People have also been eyeing another cryptocurrency called Ethereum, which skyrocketed this past month to over $15 per ETH. The Ethereum market cap surpassed $1 billion USD, but has since dumped hard and sits at above $800 million and over $10 an ETH at press time.

Bitcoin Price Continues to Stay Relatively Stable

Over the week, Bitcoin has remained above the $400 zone, and trading volume has been seemingly flat. Via Bitstamp’s books, there is support with buy orders continuing this level, yet at times, the charts have look sluggish. This bearish position may bring another downward wave below th $400 range to $385.

There has been some news from the Bitcoin world but nothing extraordinary enough to make the price rise. Coinbase has added stop orders to its exchange and all members of USAA, a financial service provider, can now use Coinbase with their existing accounts.

21inc has been making headlines as well by releasing proof of concepts like its latest Ping21. Merchant acceptance has been good with businesses like the Japanese company DMM now accepting it for services. Now 19,000 Japanese customers can use Bitcoin’s on the DMM platform via coincheck.

Bitpay has had a couple of new announcements such as integrating Precious Metals (PM) dealer JM Bullion, who will now accept Bitcoin via its merchant services. Currently, those who want to purchase PMs can use their digital currency to buy silver and gold through the bullion brokerage. The company has also announced a strategic partnership with blockchain software provider Bloq. As a commercial partner, Bloq will offer “enterprise-grade implementation and 24/7 support” for businesses using Bitcore and its development platform.

Microsoft recently made a mistake, and everyone thought they had axed Bitcoin from its payment processor. The announcement had everyone believing that the digital currency would no longer be supported by Xbox and Windows stores. However, the company explained it had made an error, and a spokesperson told CNBC. “We apologize for inaccurate information that was inadvertently posted to a Microsoft site, which is currently being corrected.”

The Rise and Subsequent Dive of Ethereum’s Price

On March 13th, the turing complete cryptocurrency Ethereum had increased its value immensely. The token had risen over $15 per ETH and had become a unicorn operation with its billion dollar market capitalization. Over the past few weeks before Ethereum had reached this momentous occasion lots of positive news had encompassed the ETH community. Lots of development was happening at the time and legacy institutions were announcing they were testing the Ethereum platform. The very next day on March 14th the cryptocurrency’s value took a dive downwards, losing its billion dollar capitalization. Despite this, hours later the price had climbed back above this bearish decline with the release of Ethereum’s second offering Homestead.

The second release included several new protocol changes and network changes giving Ethereum developers “the ability to do further network upgrades.” the team’s blog explains. The first version of the platform was Frontier a beta release that allowed developers to build decentralized apps, and smart contracts. One notable addition is that Homestead comes with “a few backward-incompatible protocol changes, and, therefore, will require a hard fork.” This means once the Ethereum blockchain reaches block 1,150,000 the network will undergo a hard fork.

After the Homestead announcement, the price per ETH remained fairly stable above 0.03 BTC up until the 16th of March where it has met much resistance going higher. In fact, the price had taken a downward spiral plummeting well below the 0.03 ranges to a flat 0.02 on March 18th. Subsequently, the value has nudged up a touch and currently sits at 0.025 above $10 per ETH. Despite this dive, the trading volume has continuously been high and exchanges like Bitfinex and coincheck have added support for ETH on their platforms.

The Cryptocurrency Experiment Continues

Bitcoin continues to operate into the spring months as some had thought it would die during the winter. However the digital currency has shown its strength and is still the forerunning cryptocurrency. The block size debate is still going on and people are curious about the outcome but it hasn’t hurt the network as much as everyone thought. Many investors and eyes are also watching the Ethereum network with considerable enthusiasm as the summer approaches. Some wonder if the past few months of news gave the token an oversold value and believe the currency was due for correction. Whatever the case may be its a sure bet that Ethereum’s value will be watched just as much as Bitcoin price over the next few months.

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Oliver Wright is an international lawyer, financier, and published author. He is the Founder and CEO of Vanquish Merchant Bank. His writings appear in journals such as the Harvard Journal of International Press-Politics. For six years Oliver was an international litigator and corporate attorney practicing cross-border mergers and acquisitions at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, the top ranked litigation firm in the country. Oliver Wright holds dual Master and Doctor of Law degrees in International and Comparative Law from Cornell Law School, where he graduated with honors and was Editor of the Cornell Law Review. He was class major valedictorian at UCLA, where he graduated summa cum laude, phi beta kappa with a BA in Communications Studies.